Managing authentication and identity across systems, users, and enterprises is complex and threat-prone, and increasingly so as endpoints and cloud-based systems continue proliferating. Current solutions for identity management, authentication, and key management are typically disparate in nature and confined in design and purpose to specific applications (e.g., network authentication protocols, PKIs, code-signing, biometrics, etc.). Various methods for deploying identity authentication technologies in contexts such as “smart grids,” cloud computing, and enterprise networks and network extensions typically include a variety of applications that would require a number of dissimilar prior art technology solutions, so as to complicate and multiply overall design, planning, and cryptographic-related overhead.
The manufacturing and provisioning costs and burdens associated with establishing “hardware biometrics” (i.e., observable intrinsic features of hardware device material, design, or manufacturing process that can uniquely differentiate a specific device from other devices of the same or similar type) to enable secure device identification, registration, and management are not insignificant. Prior to Applicant's inventions, the presumably attendant limitations and ongoing added operating complexity, risk, and overhead would have discouraged attempts to employ hardware biometrics in any types of architectures known to Applicant for managing and authenticating identities across systems, users, and enterprises, as would be required for a manufacturing through end-use approach.